The ones who walked back from the dead

These characters all had an uncanny ability to walk back from the grave:

Bobby Ewing once spent a year in the shower in Dallas while his wife Pamela was having a dream about what he could have been doing with his life. 'I've just had the strangest dream,' she uttered shortly after she realised she'd been asleep for the whole of series seven.

Emmerdale's femme fatale Claire King walked back from the dead in 1997. It transpired that she had faked her own death when her car had been driven over a cliff into a quarry. It had all been a big ploy to frame her husband, Frank, with murder.

In 1992, Neighbours' Harold Bishop mysteriously disappeared off a cliff while out on a scouting expedition. 'The Bishop' reappeared in Ramsay Street four years later, claiming amnesia.

Crossroads matriarch Meg Mortimer was first killed off in a fire, but following a public outcry, programme bosses allowed her back. Her return was short-lived however, and she was last seen by viewers sailing off into the sunset on the QE2.